As you may recall, last week we released a bombshell news story on our elections here in Wisconsin. As was explained and released here, it was recently found that the Department of Administration has people on hand that can read election programming code and that write certain election related software. As some people know and some do not, the DOA is run by the Secretary of the Department of Administration, a position directly under the Governor. So, in short, the Governor, whom most Wisconsinites do not trust nor approve of has the ability to dip his hand in elections to some extent. Despite every precaution ever made to make it impossible for any partisan interest to influence elections, we come to a point where this may be exactly the case. We demanded a statement stating what involvement the DOA has in elections software and who writes the software, among other things. We demanded this statement by 1PM today, September 6, 2011. We went to the DOA at 2:30, met by six police officers in the lobby. They handed CJ and I an envelope with the statement we had requested copied verbatim as follows:

CJ and Jeremy;

I am responding to your note from last week. I believe your questions stemmed from a Q&A with Kevin Kennedy as to whether the Government Accountability Board (GAB) has the in-house ability to evaluate the code in electronic voting equipment. Kevin’s response was no, but that in the event the GAB did decide to evaluate the code, GAB could use experts at the Department of Administration (DOA), the University of Wisconsin or outside consultants to assist them. DOA is only working on the Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) and other in-house applications – not voting equipment. There is no connection between SVRS and voting equipment. Voting equipment programming is the responsibility of local election officials, who either rely on their IT staff or hire a vendor to do it.

Christopher P. Schoenherr
Office of the Secretary
Department of Administration

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